The material soul

The world is so vast, and a person is a but a speck--

A man down in his luck sits defeated on a bench at Central Park. He wears a rented suit for the purpose of putting on the appearance of being professional so recruiters think he's acceptable enough to hire. The man's name is Noah.

It is a point of shame sometimes, a most effective shackle, to suffer despite having all sorts of privileges others can only dream off. And for many, the privileges don't even have to be plentiful, only one more than the more miserable people.

At the same time, it is also shameful to whine about how life is simply defined by suffering.

There are plenty of joyful things in the world.

Noah knows it, for he was a child blissful in ignorance.

He remembers a dream of drawing a popular comics about dragons. He still holds onto the dream in his fragile heart, his hope had gone cold but the desire still lies in his heart.

He still has the notes. He still has the drawings.

There exist tens of notebooks of them, many still somewhere in his mother's home.

He also has his papers back in college, on studies of myths and legends.

Noah cannot lie and say that his fascination with dragons isn't real.

But it will never be the same.

Why does he have to get into business? Why does he have to drown in this red ocean?

Why does he have to have bad knees that cannot weather the difficulties of manual labor? So that he could exhaust his body instead of his soul?

Noah understands that he simply didn't make it. The world is harsh and cold, and yet there exist many other people who live their ideal lives.

How else would dragons roost in his mind had he not seen them elsewhere, in works created by people who have made it, who have left a mark in this world that Noah can see them, their works, through gaps of years, decades, and centuries?

Noah returns to his flat and rests his tired soul.

A part of him wants to draw, he has an image in mind, of a bizarre creature that he must have seen in a dream. However, he doesn't feel like doing anything anymore.

Why does getting a job have to be painful? Why do stories mislead the naive into thinking that things would be easy?

It would show up on the news, employers complaining how no one wants to work anymore, and people like Noah would just shout, violently or mentally, how stupid things are.

Noah can't sleep despite tiredness weighing down his mind and body.

He tried to draw but his brain simply tingled from his nerve firing without a certain direction. He steps away from his table with the page blank yet somehow dirty.

He tried to fix himself a drink, non-alcoholic, but it just excited his heart, making it harder to sleep.

He tried to jerk off but--

Noah is dreaming of dragons again.

He saw one of his childhood favorites, the serpentine world dragon that inherited a planet from her mother goddess.

As an adult, it became easier to sympathize with the world dragon who represents wanting to stay a child despite her antiquity.

As an educated man, there's something to consider about relationship markers and identity. How Noah will always be his mother's child despite his adulthood.

As a child, Noah understood the yearning for one's parent to return home, yes. But more importantly, the world dragon is a massive creature that can blot out the sun -- very awesome.

Dragons are awesome in general.

They are huge and bizarre.

There are the simplistic winged lizards who sometimes have feathers, then there the proper monsters with idealistic features to represent an aspect of the artist and beholder.

Different cultures have their own ideas of mythical creatures that can be called a dragon.

That they are varied is fascinating.

At the same time, that they all seem to represent ideas greater then men is also quite noteworthy.

They are fear of a greater power.

They are natural blessings and disasters.

They are untouchable evil.

They are great empires and ubiquitous political systems.

The students whinged about capitalism. That, too, is a dragon. Noah already forgot but he must have a drawing somewhere.

The other curious part is that despite dragons taking up the role of a great external force, indifferent to individual people while also greatly influential to them, they are, very much without a doubt, all human creations.

Thus, the real things beyond human comprehension have been given form.

Noah wakes up feeling like he forgot something important.

Usually, that is the sign of the brain tricking itself that it did something significant, something that can be ignored summarily. But this one is a particularly sticky feeling.

It nags, without saying any exact word to be understood.

Noah is overcome with the desire to draw.

He quickly got the materials to do what must be done.

He worked all day, forgoing the simple plan of trying to find a job out there, and also forgetting to eat.

The result? Thirty pages of detailed drawings.

Strangely, Noah feels like he hasn't drawn enough dragons. Only half of the pages feature them, the rest aren't exactly doodles, but they are difficult to understand, and it would be easier to fly a pig than to see how they are related to dragons.

Noah is undoubtedly fascinated with dragons but it is never the case that he exclusively works with their image. He simply thought that a dragon dream would yield more dragon portions.

In the end, Noah ended up with concept for an apocalyptic story about the materialization of the soul, where people are collected and put in extraction vessels to be farmed for soul power.

The dragons are there to make Noah happy, for the most part, but they also represent methods of control to make sense of how people end up in vessels anyway.

While eating, Noah looks through job offers online. He checked his inbox again to see if anyone sent him any good news.

He also checked out the comics he follow that should have updated today.

There is an update that goes against the usual schedule.

Penace, author of sci-fi comic adaptation of Second Frontier, released an announcement for an upcoming project. The concept art excited Noah. They might not stand out to laymen, but Noah appreciates the balance and steadiness of the artwork.

Another thing caught Noah's attention. The premise for the new project feels similar to what Noah wrote today.

It isn't unusual for the world to end from time to time, but with that and the concept of the material soul, it becomes too familiar.

This one isn't about vessels however. It is about people collecting meteorite fragments to gain super powers, and competing for something called resonance.

There is a person asking what the concept of soul severance means.

Noah himself doesn't know, but it might be similar to extracting consciousness from one vessel to another.

The concept is not necessarily novel. There are enough stories trying to conceptualize a soul that is subject to destruction and reconstruction.

It is a bit confusing in Noah's story, however. It is easy to imagine that the soul harvest is a a matter of control, but then what are the dragons representing methods of control really mean to represent.

There is a person asking if Penace had a weird dream about music and soul rituals.

Noah felt like there's more to the dream than he thought.

He considered sending a message to this person to hear more about what they meant.

He also considered publishing his own works as if he has plans to write a series out of them.

Noah decides to take a stroll and think about life again. What else does he even do?

Noah checks his inbox. His mother wonders how he's doing.

Noah never had a good answer for that question. Noah sends a smiling face hoping that his mother drops the subject.

Noah then heard a fuss nearby. There are screams and excitement, even though it's evening at Central Park.

"Great G--! Look at the size of that thing"

"The end of the world! Is this actually happening, or am I dreaming?"

Noah's phone rings, as do many other people's phones.

Noah has a feeling it wasn't a coincidence.

Noah's mother checked in on him wondering if he'll survive through this situation.

Mother's worries proved necessary.

There are people panicking, running out, and saying things that would only spread fear.

Noah looks up and cannot believe what he sees.

There exists a creature in the sky that very much brings him back to his childhood years.

There in the sky, perched along several sheets of clouds with seventy-two legs, is the dragon of Noah's dreams.

The serpentine world dragon peeks through the clouds and makes itself known.